These Kids Make Me Afraid To Have Kids

    So I went trick or treating with some kids on Halloween.  Not my kids, but a family friend’s kids and their neighbor’s kids.  The family friend was my brother’s teacher about fifteen years ago, and one of the kids is my mom’s goddaughter.  Her kids are all girls, and the neighbors kids are all boys.  I’m going to say right up front that I don’t care too much about the boys.  We’re just not as close with their family.
    So the girls.  It’s sad, but for the last year of my relationship with my ex, I had more meaningful conversations with the now almost 4 year old twins than I did with him.  They’re little, so obviously the conversations weren’t too deep, but they are just so cute.  They know what they like, and luckily no one has told them they’re wrong yet.  What do I mean?  I mean one of the twins loves blue.  Seriously, when we color, she only colors things blue.  No joke.  She says all the time how much she loves blue.  There’s just no question about it.  I’m glad no one has told her it’s “not a girl color” or anything like that, because first of all it’s bullshit that colors (and most other things) have a gender attached to them, and second of all, even if it’s not, who cares?  Who the fuck cares?  Her twin, on the other hand, loves purple and pink.
    They both love princesses, and so do I, which is where these awesome conversations stem from about half the time.  I’m glad no one has told them they can’t like princesses because it fits into an outdated mold of femininity (obviously in different words), because I think that’s bullshit, too.  I think the only outdated mold of femininity is being the victim in an abusive relationship.  There are a lot of definitions of abusive, and no one should be the victim (or the aggressor) in any of them.  I don’t think loving Disney Princesses (or other princesses - is Sofia the First Disney or not?) is “bad” for girls.  Their mother was originally afraid to let them get into princesses, but she let up.  She was afraid it would teach them to wait around for men, but I don’t think it has.  It didn’t teach me that, and you should have seen the Exorcism-like vomit of Disney princess paraphernalia in my room when I was a kid.  As far as I can tell, they don’t care much about the boys.  They don’t even know half their names.  As far as I can tell, they think the different personality traits the princesses exhibit (aside from sitting around and waiting for a guy) are cool.  We talk about Ariel swimming and Belle reading and Pocahontas dancing.  They don’t know Jasmine or Mulan yet, which is fine because really, Mulan never is and never was a princess, so I take issue with her being on that list.  I also take issue with Alice, Megara, and Wendy Darling being on that list.  But anyway.  We talk about Merida “shoot the arrow,” we talk about Aurora talking to animals, we talk about Tiana cooking, we talk about Rapunzel painting (she does in the movie).  I don’t think they’ve actually seen Snow White, but they do know she exists.  They talk about Cinderella cleaning, and they understand that her stepmother and stepsisters shouldn’t be treating her that way.  I love the conversations, because while the princesses may fit into a damsel in distress pigeon hole, they do have good qualities that little girls can emulate (maybe not archery just yet, though...).
    Back to Halloween.  The two of them and their 6 year old sister dressed up as princesses, so when I knew I’d be able to trick or treating with them, I decided to dress up as one, too.  The two of them were Cinderella and Tiana, and their older sister was Pocahontas.  I suspect the Cinderella costume was chosen because it’s blue.  I decided to be Belle, which I also dressed up as at the Renaissance Faire.  Belle in the blue dress of course, before the widely talked about Stockholm Syndrome has taken root.  I made this book purse for the Ren faire, which was way more work than the directions indicated, and I decided to bring it with my trick or treating.  I figured I could carry some essentials without carrying my whole dang Hello Kitty purse along with me.
    I have to say that I’m one of those people (and I was when I was little) who would dress up as something awesome that most people wouldn’t get.  Attention, old neighbors: a Ghostbuster is not a carpet cleaner.  A rock lobster is also not a devil.  I think part of it is my slight OCD: if I get the idea in my head and then do something else, my brain feels funny.  So I’m kind of used to people thinking I’m something other than what I really am when I dress up.  (Except that time I was the Joker, and my co-workers didn’t know it was me under the make-up.)  But when the girls arrived at the boys’ house (where we were all meeting to eat before we went out), they all ran up to me and screamed, “Hi Belle!”  “You Belle!” and similar things.  They knew who I was!  Granted, I had shown them pictures of me at the faire, but they knew who I was then, too.  Cinderella came up to me a few minutes later and asked, “Belle, where’s you book?”  (Usually bad grammar bothers me, but on little kids it’s so fucking cute.)  My book was lying flat on the table, which was a little too high for her to see, so I pulled it down and showed her.  Her eyes lit up like I had just told her magic was real or something.  It was great.  It was also great that that’s what she associated with Belle, not, “Where’s the Beast?” or “Where’s the yellow dress?”  To her, it was perfectly fine to be provincial, bookish Belle.  Awesome.
    Tiana ended up being my trick or treat buddy, and she thought it was the balls that I called her and her sister by their chosen princess rather than her name.  She also told me, “Eileen, I like that you match me and my sisters.  We all princesses.”  All of the feels.  Seriously, all of the feels.
    Which leads me to the title of this entry.  These girls, the twins in particular, make me afraid to have kids.  Not because of the reason you originally thought, which is what that sentence usually means.  These girls are so adorable and full of love and so totally themselves.  They love me (I know they do, they tell me, and tell me they’ll miss me when I have to go home), and I love them, too.  Their combined twin greatness makes me afraid that I won’t love any other child as much as I love them, even if that child grows inside my very own body.  The twins for me are kind of the way you feel when you meet your soul mate.  You just knew that the love you felt in every relationship before was a diet version of the real thing, because now you feel the real thing.  I feel like that with the twins (platonically, of course).  I’ve known other kids and babysat other kids, but I haven’t loved any of them as much as I love these girls.  They are perfect, and I’m just afraid no other kid will measure up.